Doubting Thomas
by mamadillo
Summary: Disparate reflections on Doctor Blake, Sr.
1. Gardening

The 8-year-old slipped in gently, he knew better than to tear through his father's offices during surgery hours. He quietly asked, "Dad, did I do this right?" Even before he'd finished speaking, the boy knew he had done something wrong, yet again, and was turning to run out of his father's study protecting the small creature he carried.

"Lucien! Out!" came the impatient reply. "You know you are not to interrupt when I'm with a patient."

Finally the last patient gone, Genevieve brought tea to her husband in his study. She sat down across from him to pour. "Thomas, Lucien is just a little boy, and more, he is your son, our son. He needs your approval. Did you even notice what he had in his hands?"

Thomas hmmphed, "He is old enough to follow the rules of my house!"

His wife held out her empty hands in offering, cupped much like her son's had been a short time ago, "A bird, an injured bird. He knows your pleasure in watching them, Thomas. It had a broken wing, and he had tried to mend it. He's trying to imitate you, to see if you will take pleasure in him.

"Oh, Thomas, don't you see – one day the two of you will need one another. You cannot keep pushing him away!"

OoOoO

The father found his son, dirty hands and all, near the corner of a flower bed. What was his brown-thumbed scamp up to now? He thought of his wife's plea and sighed. "Lucien?" He leaned down, "What do you have here?"

"Just a bird, I tried to mend it, but I must've done it wrong, and it died, so I buried it," pain of failure flowed in the boy's voice and down his cheeks.

"Even the best doctors lose their patients sometimes, Lucien," his father tried to throw him a preserver, awkwardly but gently letting a hand rest on the boy's shoulder.

The lad stared fixedly at the ground, whispering, "but never you." The boy smoothed the soil nervously where he remained crouched.

"'Fraid so, son. One must learn to be brave enough to try again for the next who needs help." The boy looked up shyly, shocked at that admission. "Now," the father reached down to the boy's hands, "I'll just put these tools away, and you go wash; time to come in."

OoOoO

Two years later, the father found his son in the garden again with only memories left to interpret one for the other.

"Another bird, Lucian?"

The boy, a bit taller and more serious now, startled, gripping the trowel in both hands as if he might need a shield. "N-no, sir. Mrs. Henry gave me a pear to eat, and after I was done, I planted the core."

"Did you not think to ask permission to plant in the garden?"

"I'm sorry, sir. I thought you'd want it. I'd take care of it, sir – mow and trim the grass around it, water it."

"And what made you think that I would want a pear tree in the middle of my garden, Lucien?"

"Well, I heard Mrs. Henry say it was a d'Anjou pear, so I thought it was French, and that it might remind us of _maman_ as it grew."

"Oh, Lucien … " the hint of a laugh was swallowed by the man's misery, and his son missed it entirely. "What shall I do with you?"


	2. Running

The two lads lowered the sticks they had been using for swords to catch their breaths.

"Matthew, don't you see? He thinks I killed her, or did something that made it happen. It must be why he's sending me away. But I didn't do anything like that, I swear! Matthew, what am I going to do? I don't wanna leave."

The dark haired boy grimaced; he'd had to talk his friend out of many an overreaction before. "Blake, you're an idiot! I can't say I like it either, but you'll go; it's just a school. If he thought you killed her, he'd have Sergeant Ashby arrest you and send you to prison."

The boys continued walking down the road, kicking a rock between them. "Maybe I could run away and live off the land."

Now that made Lawson laugh! "You have trouble boiling an egg on a gas ring. And you've never paid a whit of attention to your mum or your dad in the garden or at the park to know what plants are poisonous or safe to eat! Besides," he added, "where'd you go?"

"I don't know," his worried friend shook his head, "The park, or," he snapped his fingers with a cheerful thought, "those fallen trees down near the lake – good places to hide there, and there's gotta be some fish or something I could catch."

"More likely you'd catch a cold." Matthew playfully shoved his friend's shoulder toward a turning in the road, "C'mon, you just turn in here toward my place for a while. You've run enough for today."


	3. Missing In Action

_June 1942_

As he had so often, he watched the swans gliding out of the air to the surface or rising up and racing away, the trails they made in the water quickly disappearing as the ripples spread.

The doctor felt greyer than the clouds reflected in the lake, as he considered the telegram he'd received. Missing. Things had never been easy between them, and now … now what? Now, he gave up the hope of repairing the misunderstandings and differences that had started, when? Even before they had lost Genevieve. He shook his head sadly; she had tried to show him how much the boy needed him, and indeed how much he would need his son.

He had walked through fog for the first two or three years, but gradually he'd begun to reconnect with the community around him. By that point, his son had begun to fit in to the schools he had so fiercely resisted at first.

Though he had been pleased with the boy's progress in schooling and choices of career and university, had he told him? Expressed gratitude or pride for his son's hard work to win scholarships and earn his own pocket money during lean years?

He'd tried to warn the young man of the challenges he had faced with his mother to find their place in society. Struggling to overcome cultural and language barriers in their community and smoothing ruffled feathers had been harder on him than Genevieve or their son. But had he even tried to offer a place of safety as the battlegrounds approached his son's young family? He knew Nell and Agnes still heard from his son occasionally; would the boy have listened to them?

Watching a solitary swan struggle through the air, he thought he'd felt lonely before, but this was worse. Oh, God, what had he done? Was there any penance for this? For missing so many opportunities?

 _September, 3 years later_

Deflated, he sank into the chair in the shade of the pear tree. Well, God had provided a miracle, after all. A trembling hand caressed the spot on the trunk he'd worn smooth over the years as he whispered, "Oh, Genevieve … dear Gen …"

The letter, only a short note, said that he'd survived Japanese captivity, but the tone was too wrong. After what had already filtered to the press regarding the Japanese treatment of prisoners, the doctor quickly began to doubt this news was any more merciful than his original assumption that his son had died in the massacre of Alexandra Military Hospital. All he recalled of his son's stubborn, youthful bluster gone, only distilled shame and grief remained, and still no intention to return home.


End file.
